What is sodium nitrate?

You'll find sodium nitrate in lots of pink meats like hot dogs and salami, but why? And is it bad for you? Find out what's up with sodium nitrate in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuffworks dot com where
smart Happens. Hi Am Marshall Brain with today's question, what
is sodium nitrate? It seems like lots of meats contain it?
Is it in any way harmful? Sodium nitrate and it's

(00:24):
close relative, sodium nitrite, are preservatives that you find in
lots of processed meats. Stuff like salami, hot dogs, pepperoni, bologni, ham, bacon,
and spam all contained. Sodium nitrate is one of the ingredients.
Fresh meats don't contain any added chemicals, So the question

(00:44):
is why is sodium nitrate added to all these processed meats.
There are two reasons for adding these chemicals. First, they
preserve the color of the meat, meaning that it looks
pink like spam rather than gray like a cooked hamber. Here,
you've probably noticed that nearly all meats that contain sodium
nitrate or sodium nitrite remain pink or red even though

(01:09):
they're cooked during processing. These chemicals also inhibit botulism to
some degree. The jury is out on how harmful these
substances are. Sodium nitrite reacts with stomach acid and other
chemicals in the stomach to produce nitrosamines, which have been
shown to cause cancer and animals when consumed in large quantities. However,

(01:31):
there's not much sodium nitrate in meats, and we consume
sodium nitrate from other foods as well, so it's not
clear that they're harmful in the quantities we get from meat.
Some people recommend that small children and pregnant women avoid
these chemicals altogether just to be safe. Since neither canned
chicken nor tuna have any redness to preserve, they generally

(01:55):
do not contain these nitrates and of other topics. Because
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